The most fun part of grad school for me was once I officially began my dissertation research and writing. Especially when I was on the road, or stuck in at the Library of Congress, or meeting folks at conferences or other events. Otherwise, as I’ve written about here many times, it was a single-minded, often solitary pursuit, with known and unknown enemies either trying to put me in a box or rooting for my failure. Really, if a university as a whole could be any less supportive of their students’ success than Carnegie Mellon University, it’s probably a for-profit institution with a nine (9) percent graduation rate.

That’s how my CMU experience had been even before the Spencer Foundation had awarded me my dissertation fellowship in April ’95. But I did take advantage of one generous dispensation by my department chair Steven Schlossman. My becoming ABD within a year of transferring from Pitt to CMU made me eligible for a one-semester sabbatical from teaching to pursue my dissertation research while still on my $4,000-per-semester stipend, starting in January ’95. I made sure to use it, borrowing $4,000 in student loans for that semester as well, so that I could live in DC without living in a box on a corner for a month or two.

That fall, my advisor through one of his colleagues at the University of Michigan had given me the name of a promising doctoral candidate, one who was from DC and also doing her dissertation research on Black DC. I had first called her in October ’94, to learn that her research was on leisure activities and public history in Black Washington, DC in the first half of the twentieth century. It sounded more interesting than my own research on multiculturalism in Black DC, but there were parallels. So many leisure opportunities for Blacks who lived in Uptown communities like U Street and Le Droit Park included public works on Black history, on the connections between Black history and US history. It meant that our projects were actually more connected than not.

So once I came down to DC to work like a monk in archives scattered across the area in February ’95, I contacted her. I’d meet her for the first time about three weeks into my eight-week stay in the area, near the end of February. Between my first few days staying with a former high school classmate and meeting a stranger-peer, I had nearly two-and-a-half weeks of eating, sleeping, and drinking dissertation, with a few moments in a shared kitchen listening to older men talk like we were in a barber shop about exploits and life’s lessons.

When we finally met that last Saturday in February, it was a welcome change. It helped that the doctoral candidate had her own car, a used any pretty worn blue-gray, two-door, stick-shift Saab 900 that had seen better days in the 1980s. For her part, despite grad school, the twenty-nine year-old looked younger than my twenty-five years. At five-eight and change, I wouldn’t have to look down at her in order to see the top of her head.

What impressed me the most about Marya, though, was that I could have a conversation with her about my dissertation research without her eyes glazing over, knowing full well that she understood every word coming out of my mouth. Even most of my fellow grad students at CMU and Pitt didn’t really understand my approach to multiculturalism, Black DC and African American history, and education policy. But she got it immediately.

I loved talking to Marya about her research, though. Looking at leisure and the use of space in Black communities for leisure, for everything from reading newspapers and used libraries, to literally how people walked and conversed in public. I found her work, and the way she talked about her work, fascinating. I wondered if I could ever be in love with a topic as much as her. It wasn’t that I didn’t like writing about multiculturalism. I just wasn’t star-crossed over it.

I learned so much not only during my first time hanging out with Marya, but over the next few years. I really didn’t know DC’s neighborhoods and the history of individual neighborhoods until she came along. She introduced me to the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum on local Black DC history. She took me to the Washington Historical Society off Dupont Circle, where I found additional materials on Black activities that were educational but outside the formal structure of Howard University and the segregated DC Public Schools.

She also introduced me to a vegan lifestyle, one that actually seemed sustainable. Matter of fact, when I stayed with Marya for three days in August ’95, I was on a vegan diet. I saw the appeal, but my gastrointestinal tract, well on its way to IBS-land, could only handle but so much in raw fruits and vegetables. Still, Marya introduced me to so many neighborhoods and restaurants, to Ethiopian food in Adams Morgan, to vegan Chinese food in Rockville, to fellow grad students worked on public history dissertations, to young, intellectual DC in general.

Marya also unintentionally helped me see a side of Black thought that I hadn’t seen before. That she survived the Afrocentricity wars at Temple University while earning her master’s there made her tough but also made me weary of discussing my many criticisms of Molefi Asante and his grand entourage of followers. I was so relieved to learn that though she liked some aspects of Afrocentricity, Marya didn’t follow it blindly like so many others I knew in the ’90s. I’d met someone who also marched to the beat of her own drum.

Maybe I would’ve met these folks, made these connections, and gone to these places anyway. Maybe not. But if the former, it would’ve happened much more slowly and cautiously. Marya, for better and for worse, might have been one reason I thought of the DC area as a potential home after more than a decade living and earning degrees in Pittsburgh. Marya McQuirter, though, enriched my life in the years in which I needed it most. I’ve always admired her and her work, and will always see her as a friend.

This year marks a half-century since the official shift of the Civil Rights Era from the traditional Civil Rights leadership of the Black Church toward one of “Black Power.” Between Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Touré’s famous 1966 speech, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s founding of the Black Panther Party that October, and riots that began with Watts in L.A. the year before, this was a pivotal year in American and African American history. Of course, as historians and other scholars like Peniel Joseph and Alondra Nelson have illuminated in recent years, while 1966 was a pivotal year, it was not a departure from a long history of the Black freedom struggle, but part a continuity. For Joseph and Nelson (not to mention, Robin D. G. Kelley and Michael Eric Dyson), Black Power was a continuation of radical ideas and actions in order to stand in opposition to American capitalism and racism as an intertwined system of oppression. The roots of which go at least as far back as Black sharecroppers and their union organizing efforts during the Great Depression, if not in fact to the radicalism of Martin Delany of the 1850s.

These wonderful scholars are absolutely right to dump the simplistic narrative of Black Power as a symbol of/departure from the struggle for civil rights or as a philosophy that advocates violence against Whites, especially Whites in law enforcement. They are also more than right to point out how Black Power and the Black Panther Party did way more good on a policy level than most Americans would ever give their leaders credit for. Fred Hampton and Newton and the Free Breakfast for School Children Program that started in Chicago and Oakland between 1969 and 1972. The People’s Free Medical Centers (PFMC), Free Ambulance Service, and other direct community involvement to provide free access to health care and screenings for thousands of impoverished Black families. Free food programs for the destitute.

Angela Davis on Newsweek cover after 1970 arrest, October 26, 1970. (http://pinterest.com). Qualifies as fair use due to adjustments for low resolution.

But more than that. The idea that Black communities could work to provide services and opportunities otherwise denied to them by American society was to be a major takeaway from this era of the overall Black freedom struggle. And of course, the idea that police served as an oppressive occupying force, and that Black citizens had every right to defend themselves against police brutality. Though direct armed struggle with law enforcement was in the Black Panther Party toolbox, the notion of policing the police, community control over schools, a community using its available resources, is still more positive than negative. These remain implementable ideas that have and do provide an outlet to the daily grind of racial discrimination and deep poverty in so many parts of the US.

Culturally, the freedom struggle as expressed through Black Power and the Black Panther Party, particularly by leaders like Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Amiri Baraka, and Kwame Touré, was one of what we know would call Afrocentricity today. This was/is far more than wearing Afros, daishikis, sea shells and beads (or for that matter, black turtlenecks and tight pants). It would mean advocating for and getting universities (both predominantly White universities and HBCUS) to adopt Black Studies programs. It would mean influencing a whole generation of Black artists (the arts, music, and cinema) to adopt a “I’m Black and proud” stance in their work, from Marvin Gaye and the Lost Poets and Gil Scott Heron, to movies like Shaft and that first mainstream miniseries, Roots.

The Black Power Generation (kind of like Prince and The Revolution that tried to incorporate a mesh of messages between 1979 and 1986), for all of the elements that survived Huey Newton and his purges of the 1970s and early 1980s — not to mention their continuing influence in American pop culture, in Black intellectual thought, and in Black movements in general — was hardly perfect. Some, like the late Kwame Touré, promoted Black Power as a sort of authentic Blackness, a kind in which one had to buy all of the options on the table in order to be authentic. The “Uncle Tom” accusation or its equivalent was thrown at Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, Arthur Ashe, and others whose support of Black Power was less that full-throated. Not to mention, the tensions between leaders within the Black Panther Party and among African American intellectuals who attempted to ride the wave of Black Power, as nearly forgotten Black intellectuals Harold Cruse and Nathan Wright, Jr. noted in the late-1960s.

That lingering legacy of Black Power is part of its appeal and one of its limits — the ability to redefine ourselves and retell our history in a way that brings nuance and truth. But nuance and truth are not always absolutes. In many respects, Black Power over the generations shares a similarity with Marxist thought and action. Just as Marxism represents a dialectical opposition to capitalist oppression, Black Power has always represented a dialectical resistance to Whiteness and the racist/capitalist oppression that comes with Whiteness. It just doesn’t represent the only form of resistance there is, at least not as Newton, Touré, and others lived their resistance. Black Power is more than resistance, and more than just an amorphous idea standing in opposition to Whiteness. It’s just not the only form of Blackness there is. My own upbringing would be a further testimony to this (to be continued…).

Every time 2016 presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT as of 2015; an Independent prior to last year) says that he is a “Democratic Socialist,” it grinds my beans. The man is leftist and well-educated enough to know that what he is saying doesn’t match up with his voting record or his advocacy. Every time a member of the Socialist Party (or Christian Democratic Party, or Social Democratic Party) in Germany, France or Italy hears Sanders say those two words, they probably just laugh themselves off a bar stool.

The fact is, Bernie Sanders is a Social Democrat, or more specifically, a New Deal Democrat, someone in the camp of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, or former presidential hopefuls Adlai Stevenson and Henry Wallace. What is a Social Democrat? They are folks who believe in taking socialist principles and social justice stands to ameliorate the impact that capitalism has on the lives of the most disadvantaged citizens of their society. They are not fans of capitalism, but they also have no long-term aspirations for an economic revolution that would do away with capitalism as an economic system, either.

Given all that Sanders has done in his thirty-five year career, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont (1981-89), as a congressman (from 1991-2007), and as senator, he has never advocated for the end of capitalism and the installation of a state-controlled or people’s economy. That, however, is EXACTLY what Democratic Socialists advocate. They are somewhere between the Marxist and Socialist camps of leftists, though with a healthy respect for a democratic path toward socialism, and not necessarily one through civil war and a bloody revolution. That Sanders has forgotten the difference is intellectually infuriating and politically imprudent with an electorate and a media that is as fickle as it is center-right ideologically.

There’s nothing wrong with Sanders being a Social Democrat. FDR, JFK, and LBJ, even Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft thought that a combination of regulated capitalism and government intervention in the promotion of social justice was critical to the survival and success of the nation. They firmly believed in the American experiment as constructed in the years since the Civil War. Even though the American experiment is a false narrative, that perception of America as a successful experiment has frequently pushed the levers of ameliorating and justice forward just enough for change to occur. Even if that change is often incremental and symbolic.

President Roosevelt at the end of his life and third term as president proposed a new bill of rights. During his next to last State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, FDR outlined what he called an economic bill of rights. President Roosevelt deemed this second bill of rights necessary in light of the causes of World War II, the combination of the Great Depression and the false promises of totalitarian racist regimes. In introducing his new bill of rights, FDR said, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence…People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

FDR’s 2nd Bill of Rights, “a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed,” included the following:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

This sums up Bernie Sanders and his platform very nicely. It isn’t Democratic Socialism, but it is what most Americans should be willing to hear and support. It would make sense for Sanders to say that he’s a Neal Deal lefty, though.

I’m still reeling over Maurice White. Yeah, I still have my Earth, Wind & Fire on my CDs, my iPod, my iPhone, on three laptops and a desktop. Phillip Bailey and White’s brothers-in-arts are still here. Their music will always be with me and with us. But it feels like a little piece of my relative (if not contrived) innocence from my pre-Humanities, pre-Hebrew-Israelite days died with White Wednesday night.

Here’s what I wrote about those days of deliberately-induced blissful naiveté, Earth, Wind & Fire included, in my memoir:

“For me, this boy, this tweener, an active imagination and an even more animated dream life was critical. Living in between the hustle and bustle of “The City,” — Manhattan and the other four boroughs of New York — and the relative quiet of the ritzy suburbs immediately north of it was everything and everyone I knew before the age of twelve. Just three blocks after the elevated 2 Subway line ended at East 241st Street in the Bronx was where “Mount Vernon, New York” began. From the hard concrete sidewalks and green street signs of New York to the crumbling light blue slate and dark blue signs were my only indications that I had truly left the city. This despite the claims of so many I knew that upstate New York began somewhere above 125th or 207th Street in Manhattan. I knew by the time I was twelve that, sleepy bedroom suburb or not, Mount Vernon had more features in common with the Bronx and upper Manhattan than most city folk were willing to recognize.

“My only links to the great metropolis to the south were WNBC-TV (Channel 4), Warner Wolf — with his famous “Let’s go to the video tape line — doing sports on WCBS-TV (Channel 2), and WABC-AM 77 and WBLS-FM 107.5 on the radio. I found the AM station more fun to listen to, but I also liked listening to the sign-off song WBLS played at the end of the evening, Moody’s Mood for Love, with that, ‘There I go, There I go, The-ere I go…’ start. Music had been an important part of my imagination in ’79, with acts like Earth, Wind & Fire, Christopher Cross, Billy Joel and The Commodores. Not to mention Frank Sinatra, Queen, Donna Summer and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall album. The music also made me feel like I was as much a part of New York as I was a part of Mount Vernon. It left me thinking of the ozone and burnt rubber smell that I noticed as soon as I would walk down into the Subway system in Manhattan. But aside from my occasional slip of the tongue — ‘warda’ for ‘water’ and ‘bawwgt’ for ‘bought’ — I didn’t sound or act much like a New Yawker. Still, I discovered something about New York from afar. I could sneak up to the rooftop of my apartment building, 616 East Lincoln, a five-story complex of three connected brick buildings with Tudor-style facades and a concrete-stone foundation. I’d find the exit to the roof unlocked and see the tops of the Twin Towers floating over some low-lying clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The symbols of the greatest city on Earth seemed to float toward the heavens on those days, and me with them.

“Besides the occasional reminder of life outside of my world, of Mount Vernon, I was the center of my own universe. Mount Vernon was but a stage on which my life played out, a place I hoped would stay this way forever. I was an eleven-year-old who thought that my world was the world. I lived my life like Philip Bailey and Maurice White would’ve wanted me to. I came to see ‘victory in a life [sic] called fantasy’ as my own life, living as if my imagination and dreams could be made into reality. All I had to do was wish it so.”

Because of what I went through during the Boy @ The Window years, I had to learn to get over my idiot ex-stepfather’s abuse to continue listening to Earth, Wind & Fire between ’82 and ’89. The late Maurice Eugene Washington was a fan as well, and I didn’t want us to both like the same music. Who the heck knew what was going on in his head when he heard “Fantasy” or “After The Love Is Gone,” anyway?

All I know is, there won’t be another group like the one Maurice White founded in ’69, the year I was born. All I can do is hold on to my precious Earth, Wind & Fire music, and the imagination that it helped spark. All I can do now is hope that someone can even begin to approach the kind of ethereal and powerfully Black-and-proud mix of music that White, Bailey, et al. were able to construct for nearly a decade. One can fantasize, right?

A few months ago, I found myself pondering the many years in which I and a cadre of experts, scholars, and trolls have written and talked about American racism. The evidence (or lack thereof) that those who fight for racial justice and those who fight for White supremacy (or at least, a White-dominated status quo) have gathered. The sense of righteous indignation or dispassionate sense of racial superiority expressed in sound bites, at conferences, in classrooms, in faculty and staff meetings. I found myself thinking, “We’re never going to convince the majority that they have built themselves a hypocritical house of cards, are we?”

Of course this is true. A person doesn’t have to be a pessimist or fatalistic to arrive at this conclusion. Long before Ta-Nehisi Coates or the great late Derrick Bell, or James Baldwin or Malcolm X, or even W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, there was the sense that the house that racism built could never be broken down with faith and words alone. Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Ida B. Wells (or Wells-Barnett) said as much in the nineteenth century. It would take action, perhaps even, a calamity to break down this house.

I started thinking about American racism as an atom, then. It could be as simple as a hydrogen atom, but despite the preponderance of Americans who will live out their lives in willful ignorance, America and its racism is a bit more complicated than one proton and one electron. That’s the America most of my students think they live in. When it comes to racism, America is more like a carbon or iron atom before being smashed at light speed in a particle accelerator in Switzerland. With lots of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Enough so that it could combine with anything and corrupt everything.

Carbon is very much a constantly morphing combinator. Scientists can make virtually endless chains and structures with carbon — along with its companions, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen — giving us plenty of other organic compounds not found in nature. That is American intersectionality in a nutshell, between racism, class inequality, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other -isms that combine and recombine from one generation and one issue to the next. Stereotypes, microaggressions, and death by a thousand cuts, are its results.

But carbon molecules in the natural world already exists in long and almost endless chains. Our DNA and its double-helix strands, the structure of hydrocarbons that make up petroleum and natural gas. Even without the interventions that make interpersonal, individual, and internalized racism the fodder for social media and American politics, structural racism and institutional racism are already well embedded in America’s vast array of institutions.

Then there’s the stuff that’s beyond the mix of the six electrons, six protons, and six neutrons that make up a carbon atom. Quarks, leptons, bosons, among as many as 248 subatomic particles — including gluons, neutrinos, and photons. The newly discovered Higgs boson particle (as of 2012), for instance, is apparently what provides matter mass.

The subatomics of American racism, though, are fairly well-known and haven’t been new to us researchers for decades. Imperialism, American exceptionalism, narcissism, and capitalism. They all help give mass to American racism, so that it is not just a matter of perception, or, as some mavericks have suggested, a disease or psychosis. These are the particles that convert the energies of racism into a tangible, weighty reality.

An example of simulated data modeled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. (where collision of two protons would produce a Higgs boson particle and release energy, in blue), October 1997. (Lucas Taylor/CERN via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Yet atoms and their subatomic particles aren’t forever. Heck, electrons are often in two places at the same time, their quantum locations change so often. The way scientists know all this is through atom smashing at places like the Hadron collider in Switzerland. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to smash protons straight into a group of atoms to explode its subatomic contents. Ultimately, somewhere between fusion, fission, and smashing, to break down the carbon-like atom that is American racism. But I don’t think those of us working to do so should hold our collective breath.

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below: